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‘The hornets are numerous down in that cave; we do not touch it; it is taboo.’

‘I mean it doesn't mean that I want to be rude, it's not that, it's just that you go to certain spaces that are taboo.’

‘As they saw it, many details concerning clan histories and taboo places have been forgotten over the past few generations.’

‘In the Solomon Islands, shrines are always taboo places.’

‘Totems of specific clans, healers, or royal dynasties are taboo to certain members of some ethnic groups.’

‘Not only taboo places but also mountain tops were known to be frequented by spirits.’

‘Christianity was another force that was gradually eliminating dangers from spirits based at taboo sites.’

verb

[with object]

Place under a taboo.

‘traditional societies taboo female handling of food during this period’

‘Almost all animal flesh is edible and nutritious, yet most human societies taboo many of the animal species available to them.’

‘As for myself, I no longer care for chemical research, and science is a tabooed topic in my household.’

‘She asks whether statutory rape laws really protect girls, or serve to target them by making them sexually tabooed and, hence, more attractive.’

‘As the child accepts that bodily products such as excrement and vomit are tabooed as repugnant and dirty, simultaneously it begins to form concepts of cleanliness and propriety that work toward defining the emergent sense of selfhood.’

‘Sacred and tabooed beliefs also work as membership badges in coalitions.’

‘Some magic users, magicians, and quite strong ones at that, decided that magic shouldn't be tabooed and decided to rebel against the society that had made them outsiders for so long.’

‘Clearly it was she, and felt sorry for the creature outside, that she was tabooed never to speak with.’

‘Rooted in an era that tabooed discussions of sex, he rebounded to the opposite extreme and exaggerated the roles of sex and sexual conflict in the development of the psyche.’

‘That these kinds of magazines have been tabooed in our society; forced universally under mattresses, in private drawers, and into unmarked brown boxes.’

‘The inside of the tabooed room leads to the outside; here too it constitutes an inside of the external local world associated with modernity.’

‘Online communities allow a degree of security in, and can hence facilitate, the declaration of socially marginalized or tabooed identities, such as gay, lesbian or various fetish orientations.’

‘Conversely, in some cultures, when a person dies, his or her name and similar sounding words may be tabooed, so new words have to be coined or borrowed.’

Origin

Late 18th century: from Tongan tabu ‘set apart, forbidden’; introduced into English by Captain Cook.